WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 – A team of researchers from the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have developed an optical device that allows them to peer through the eyes of a mouse and monitor the cells passing through its bloodstream.In the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Optics Letters, published by the Optical Society of America, the team describes how they used the device, called a retinal flow cytometer, to non-invasively sample the blood passing through the vessels in the retinal tissue in the back of the eye. There they were able to detect circulating fluorescently labeled cells as they wound their way through the mouse.
